Unlike sites with self-signed certs, sites with vanilla HTTP make no claim about their security.
I'm not sure what claim you're talking about. If I set up a site with https and a self-signed certificate, I'm not trying to fool anybody by claiming that my sight is perfectly secure. I'm just trying to create an encrypted channel that can't be eavesdropped.
< start rant not directed at parent>
If anything it's the browser that is making the claim by showing the lock. So what is the solution? Don't show the lock for a self-signed cert or change the url color. Yes, it is that simple. You don't need four steps of warning to approve a site that is less dangerous that plain http.
Oh, but what about all those people who you told to look for https to know that the site is safe? Guess what, you misinformed those people and that is the real problem. The only reason people make the assumption of https being perfectly secure is because that's what the "experts" have been telling them for the last several years.
But what about all those users who aren't technical enough to understand CA signed vs self signed certificates? The majority of those users also won't understand http vs. https so the new firefox warnings aren't going to help them. If anything it will hurt them because now they will just be further trained to click through any warnings they get.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most is the fact that the new firefox doesn't have a simple configuration option to allow self signed certs. Instead of giving some responsibility to the user to accept the risk, they are forcing me into their security model that I don't agree with.
<end rant>
No, I propose that the firefox team just comes up with a better interface for warning users about self signed certificates. The current interface makes http appear to be safe and self signed certificates appear evil. The lock color scheme option proposed earlier would be find with me. Or at least give me a configuration option to turn off the warning and let me surf at my own risk. I love the anti phishing stuff in firefox, and I'm sure that will save many users from giving away their private information. However, I don't believe that the firefox 3 interface for dealing with self-signed certificates will actually prevent any attacks, and it is obviously causing a lot of headaches based on the community response.
Mom and pop users should never, ever go to a website with self-signed or expired certs.
You might want to add that Mom and pop users should never go to a website using basic http. Since many phishing sites don't bother with https. The ones that do use https could set up a domain name like www.phish.com/paypal and get their certificate signed by a thirdparty. Now those Mom and pop users can go to the https site will a full sense of security. Do you think that mom and pop users will tell the difference? I know my Mom wouldn't.
The grandparent wasn't talking about authority-signed vs. self-signed certificates. The comparison is between self-signed https to unencrypted HTTP. Unencrypted HTTP is also vulnerable to MITM and other types of attacks, why doesn't firefox give me a big warning when I go to one of those sites?
A much better Firefox GUI would be to just show a different lock icon or color for sites with self-signed certificates. Making me go through several steps to accept a certificate is a waste of my time. All it accomplishes is to teach users to ignore browser warnings so that when a real security issue comes up they will ignore it. The current firefox gui for this looks a lot like the warning for phishing sites. I wouldn't be surprised if users get used to the self-signed ssl warnings, and then stumble across a fishing site and click through because they thought it was just another certificate warning.
I think this is something that most people forget. Your vote for a winning candidate doesn't matter when the race isn't close. If you live in California or Texas for example you already know how the results will turn out. So voting for a Democrat or Republican in one of those states is a waste. Whereas voting for a thirdparty candidate can give a voice to your opinions and possibly influence whoever does end up getting elected.
Of course the best solution would be to change the voting system. But it's doubtful that will happen anytime soon.
I totally agree with you that until we change the voting system, we are stuck with this game of wasted votes and blaming third parties for a loss on either side. But I think instant runoff voting has it's own problems. The best system would be a range or approval voting system. The book Gaming the vote analyzes several voting systems and provides a good explanation of why range voting would be better than the other methods.
It's not that surprising that you haven't heard of it if you live in the US. For some reason Go never caught on here, but it's very popular in Asia, especially China, Japan, and Korea. Big matches are televised and top players can make a lot of money. It's really a great game. I used to play a bit of chess, and then I learned how to play go a few years ago, and now chess seems kind of boring.
If you want to learn a bit more about it, Sensei's Library is a good place to start.
Or if you want to jump right in to some basic problems, the go problems site will help you get a good understanding of the rules.
I think the grandparent meant that the constitution doesn't grant any rights to individuals. Each individual is assumed to have the right to do whatever they want. The government can then take away some of these rights in order to prevent people from taking away freedoms from each other. The first ten amendments do not actually grant any new rights to the people, they just prevent the government from taking away certain inalienable rights of the people.
So the government starts out with nothing, and gets only the powers listed in the constitution (like you said). And the people start out with everything, and rights are gradually taken away by the legal system.
I agree with you. I don't understand why this movie got such great reviews. It was good, but I didn't think it was as good as Cars or some of the other Pixar movies. To me the movie didn't have a lot of depth, the only characters that changed or grew were the general public who made the obvious change of rediscovering a little motivation. It wasn't realistic. Why did the people all fall over when the ship tilted, if the ship has artificial gravity, they would hardly notice a tilt like that. How could they possibly deal with returning to Earth's gravity if their bones and muscles had atrophied. Also, how can these people clean up the Earth now if they couldn't do it thousands of years ago?
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind science fiction taking some liberties with reality. It pretty much has to break some rules, but at a certain point, the story loses it's internal consistency to the point where the message of the story has no meaning.
I also don't understand the big deal about an understandable movie with little dialog. Hasn't this already been done plenty of times?
I would say "Everyone has something to hide. If you think you don't, I'm sure you'll be happy to give out your credit card numbers and the passwords to all of your accounts".
I 100% agree with you that everyone has something to hide, but I think a better example question is "Can I have all your usernames and passwords and share them with anyone I want?". I think the key to privacy is preventing vulnerability, and giving up privacy of your passwords makes you vulnerable to various things like identity theft, monetary theft, or embarrassment.
Such as why should Paris/London be selected as the "ideal" time zone, as opposed to Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, or New York/Washington DC? GMT/UTC is an adopted standard only because that is what mariners for the UK Royal Navy used during a period of global colonial dominance, not that the French didn't mind using the same standard either for the most part as Paris and London are nearly the same longitude, at least for time considerations.
I think you answered your own question. GMT/UTC is already an adopted standard, so I don't think there would be such a problem as you describe. No one has to force various coutries/organizations to adopt the standard. But if the US government decides that it's going to start scheduling everything using UTC, then companies will follow simply because it's more convenient.
One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office".
Removing timezones and DST would actually make this easier and more accurate, not more difficult. Instead of doing a calculation to figure out the current time in a another time zone, then thinking about whether it is currently DST there, and then checking if it is after 10PM, you would just have to look up what time the sun goes down there.
At my company we already use UTC to schedule meetings across various time zones, and it makes things much easier. On my gnome desktop I have two clock applets, one in my local time, and one in UTC. Speaking from experience, trying to schedule or attend a meeting using my local time as a reference is much more difficult than just using UTC.
And when fewer bands go through the standard music industry, less money will be there for signing deals with small bands.
A different way to look at it is that when fewer people buy music from the standard industry, there will be more money available to go directly to the smaller bands. Instead of paying $10-15 for a single CD of some band that is high in the charts, you could buy $4-5 for music from three bands. One big name band and 2 small local bands.
As an added bonus, if the big name band is not using a big label, then you could give them $5 directly, which means they might be getting the same money either way. I would greatly prefer more of my money going to the artist that created the music, and less going to the various departments (execs, HR, Marketing, etc) of a big record company.
Since it's really not enough to cover the development costs, it seems to me like it would be better to have multiple prizes instead of just one. Having 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes of 15, 10, and 5 million would be more encouraging to the various competitors IMO. That way the first company to do accomplish the goal would get 15, and maybe the second company is able to do the same thing more slowly, but also more cheaply and possibly with other advantages. That way you continue the competition over a greater time period, and possibly foster more innovation.
This reminds me of the simpsons episode where Bill Gates "buys out" Homer's internet company.
From the simpsons archive:
Bill Gates: Your Internet ad was brought to my attention, but I can't figure out what, if
anything, Compuglobalhypermeganet does, so rather than risk competing with
you, I've decided simply to buy you out.
% Homer and Marge quietly discuss this proposal.
Homer: I reluctantly accept your proposal!
Bill Gates: Well everyone always does. Buy 'em out, boys! [Gates' lackeys trash the room.]
Homer: Hey, what the hell's going on!
Bill Gates: Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks! [insane
laughter]
Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Genetic mutations (part of evolution) from generation to the next is an observable fact. The "theory" part of evolution is really the theory of common descent. For now, the best explanation we can come up with is that all species on earth evolved from a single source or multiple similar sources. If one day we discover that some species evolved from an organism that arrived here via space debris and others evolved directly out of inorganic material, then we may have a modified or new version of our common descent theory.
This is exactly why we need to change the voting system, and as long as you vote for one of the two major parties the system will never change. The Democrats and Republicans like the current voting system, and they like it when they can point the finger at a third-party candidate and say "that is why I didn't win". Instead they should be thinking about changing the voting system, but they won't because that means third party candidates will have an even better chance to actually win and take away some of their power.
I'd keep all my stuff in a shopping cart. I could even fit a couple changes of clothes, some extra food, medicine, misc. garbage, etc. The three working wheels on the bottom would make it easy to push my stuff around to a good work location during the day and a comfortable place to sleep at night.
Probably many people are concerned about the privacy issues. Public information about your family could be used against you or your family by classmates, angry neighbors, etc. But I agree with you, and I'm not sure why you were modded down.
I blog about my family, mostly for the enjoyment of my friends and relatives. I do think about what information I should or shouldn't share with the public, but in general I think if someone is out to get me for some reason, they probably aren't going to be helped that much by a blog. In fact it may even be a deterrent if they get to know me or my kids.
Basically, she's a pro-war, corporate, conservative Democrat who has managed to hijack her party's nomination. It looks like another voting day is coming out where I can just sit home and relax. You can always vote in the primary to help elect a better candidate for your party. And if you don't like the democrat or republican, then please vote 3rd party. There are several to choose from (libertarian, green, reform, etc), and your vote will go towards promoting issues that you care about instead of toward a least common denominator democrat or republican.
It seems like shortening the length of these types of patents would be such a simple solution to our current litigation problem. I would prefer no patents on software at all, but as an easy alternative, why not just make the life of a software patent something like 3 years. That would be plenty of time for a company with a good idea to get a competitive advantage, and it would prevent a lot of these wasteful lawsuits. After the 3 years the idea should go to the public domain, so that anyone can use it without fear of retribution.
We *need* this goddamn world. You won't lose it during your life time. In the long run, the Sun gets hotter, so will Earth, and there's nothing you can do about it. Earth is a lost cause, get over it. I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic with your post, but just in case you weren't, yes the Earth will get hotter. But it's a question of how long can the human race survive comfortably on earth, hundreds to thousands of years (global warming), or billions of years (the sun's lifecycle). I know I would prefer the latter.
There is a presentation about similar topics by Luis von Ahn on here. The presentation talks about using what he calls human computation, basically using people on the internet to perform various tasks that are difficult for computers to do. One idea is using people playing a game to label images on the internet so that they can be indexed with much greater accuracy than the current google image search.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike sites with self-signed certs, sites with vanilla HTTP make no claim about their security.
I'm not sure what claim you're talking about. If I set up a site with https and a self-signed certificate, I'm not trying to fool anybody by claiming that my sight is perfectly secure. I'm just trying to create an encrypted channel that can't be eavesdropped.
< start rant not directed at parent>
If anything it's the browser that is making the claim by showing the lock. So what is the solution? Don't show the lock for a self-signed cert or change the url color. Yes, it is that simple. You don't need four steps of warning to approve a site that is less dangerous that plain http.
Oh, but what about all those people who you told to look for https to know that the site is safe? Guess what, you misinformed those people and that is the real problem. The only reason people make the assumption of https being perfectly secure is because that's what the "experts" have been telling them for the last several years.
But what about all those users who aren't technical enough to understand CA signed vs self signed certificates? The majority of those users also won't understand http vs. https so the new firefox warnings aren't going to help them. If anything it will hurt them because now they will just be further trained to click through any warnings they get.
Probably the thing that bothers me the most is the fact that the new firefox doesn't have a simple configuration option to allow self signed certs. Instead of giving some responsibility to the user to accept the risk, they are forcing me into their security model that I don't agree with. <end rant>
No, I propose that the firefox team just comes up with a better interface for warning users about self signed certificates. The current interface makes http appear to be safe and self signed certificates appear evil. The lock color scheme option proposed earlier would be find with me. Or at least give me a configuration option to turn off the warning and let me surf at my own risk. I love the anti phishing stuff in firefox, and I'm sure that will save many users from giving away their private information. However, I don't believe that the firefox 3 interface for dealing with self-signed certificates will actually prevent any attacks, and it is obviously causing a lot of headaches based on the community response.
Mom and pop users should never, ever go to a website with self-signed or expired certs.
You might want to add that Mom and pop users should never go to a website using basic http. Since many phishing sites don't bother with https. The ones that do use https could set up a domain name like www.phish.com/paypal and get their certificate signed by a thirdparty. Now those Mom and pop users can go to the https site will a full sense of security. Do you think that mom and pop users will tell the difference? I know my Mom wouldn't.
The grandparent wasn't talking about authority-signed vs. self-signed certificates. The comparison is between self-signed https to unencrypted HTTP. Unencrypted HTTP is also vulnerable to MITM and other types of attacks, why doesn't firefox give me a big warning when I go to one of those sites?
A much better Firefox GUI would be to just show a different lock icon or color for sites with self-signed certificates. Making me go through several steps to accept a certificate is a waste of my time. All it accomplishes is to teach users to ignore browser warnings so that when a real security issue comes up they will ignore it. The current firefox gui for this looks a lot like the warning for phishing sites. I wouldn't be surprised if users get used to the self-signed ssl warnings, and then stumble across a fishing site and click through because they thought it was just another certificate warning.
I think this is something that most people forget. Your vote for a winning candidate doesn't matter when the race isn't close. If you live in California or Texas for example you already know how the results will turn out. So voting for a Democrat or Republican in one of those states is a waste. Whereas voting for a thirdparty candidate can give a voice to your opinions and possibly influence whoever does end up getting elected.
Of course the best solution would be to change the voting system. But it's doubtful that will happen anytime soon.
I totally agree with you that until we change the voting system, we are stuck with this game of wasted votes and blaming third parties for a loss on either side. But I think instant runoff voting has it's own problems. The best system would be a range or approval voting system. The book Gaming the vote analyzes several voting systems and provides a good explanation of why range voting would be better than the other methods.
It's not that surprising that you haven't heard of it if you live in the US. For some reason Go never caught on here, but it's very popular in Asia, especially China, Japan, and Korea. Big matches are televised and top players can make a lot of money. It's really a great game. I used to play a bit of chess, and then I learned how to play go a few years ago, and now chess seems kind of boring.
If you want to learn a bit more about it, Sensei's Library is a good place to start. Or if you want to jump right in to some basic problems, the go problems site will help you get a good understanding of the rules.
I think the grandparent meant that the constitution doesn't grant any rights to individuals. Each individual is assumed to have the right to do whatever they want. The government can then take away some of these rights in order to prevent people from taking away freedoms from each other. The first ten amendments do not actually grant any new rights to the people, they just prevent the government from taking away certain inalienable rights of the people.
So the government starts out with nothing, and gets only the powers listed in the constitution (like you said). And the people start out with everything, and rights are gradually taken away by the legal system.
I agree with you. I don't understand why this movie got such great reviews. It was good, but I didn't think it was as good as Cars or some of the other Pixar movies. To me the movie didn't have a lot of depth, the only characters that changed or grew were the general public who made the obvious change of rediscovering a little motivation. It wasn't realistic. Why did the people all fall over when the ship tilted, if the ship has artificial gravity, they would hardly notice a tilt like that. How could they possibly deal with returning to Earth's gravity if their bones and muscles had atrophied. Also, how can these people clean up the Earth now if they couldn't do it thousands of years ago? Don't get me wrong, I don't mind science fiction taking some liberties with reality. It pretty much has to break some rules, but at a certain point, the story loses it's internal consistency to the point where the message of the story has no meaning. I also don't understand the big deal about an understandable movie with little dialog. Hasn't this already been done plenty of times?
I would say "Everyone has something to hide. If you think you don't, I'm sure you'll be happy to give out your credit card numbers and the passwords to all of your accounts".
I 100% agree with you that everyone has something to hide, but I think a better example question is "Can I have all your usernames and passwords and share them with anyone I want?". I think the key to privacy is preventing vulnerability, and giving up privacy of your passwords makes you vulnerable to various things like identity theft, monetary theft, or embarrassment.
I think you answered your own question. GMT/UTC is already an adopted standard, so I don't think there would be such a problem as you describe. No one has to force various coutries/organizations to adopt the standard. But if the US government decides that it's going to start scheduling everything using UTC, then companies will follow simply because it's more convenient.
One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office".Removing timezones and DST would actually make this easier and more accurate, not more difficult. Instead of doing a calculation to figure out the current time in a another time zone, then thinking about whether it is currently DST there, and then checking if it is after 10PM, you would just have to look up what time the sun goes down there.
At my company we already use UTC to schedule meetings across various time zones, and it makes things much easier. On my gnome desktop I have two clock applets, one in my local time, and one in UTC. Speaking from experience, trying to schedule or attend a meeting using my local time as a reference is much more difficult than just using UTC.
A different way to look at it is that when fewer people buy music from the standard industry, there will be more money available to go directly to the smaller bands. Instead of paying $10-15 for a single CD of some band that is high in the charts, you could buy $4-5 for music from three bands. One big name band and 2 small local bands.
As an added bonus, if the big name band is not using a big label, then you could give them $5 directly, which means they might be getting the same money either way. I would greatly prefer more of my money going to the artist that created the music, and less going to the various departments (execs, HR, Marketing, etc) of a big record company.
Since it's really not enough to cover the development costs, it seems to me like it would be better to have multiple prizes instead of just one. Having 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes of 15, 10, and 5 million would be more encouraging to the various competitors IMO. That way the first company to do accomplish the goal would get 15, and maybe the second company is able to do the same thing more slowly, but also more cheaply and possibly with other advantages. That way you continue the competition over a greater time period, and possibly foster more innovation.
From the simpsons archive:
Bill Gates: Your Internet ad was brought to my attention, but I can't figure out what, if anything, Compuglobalhypermeganet does, so rather than risk competing with you, I've decided simply to buy you out.
% Homer and Marge quietly discuss this proposal.
Homer: I reluctantly accept your proposal!
Bill Gates: Well everyone always does. Buy 'em out, boys! [Gates' lackeys trash the room.]
Homer: Hey, what the hell's going on!
Bill Gates: Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks! [insane laughter]
Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Genetic mutations (part of evolution) from generation to the next is an observable fact. The "theory" part of evolution is really the theory of common descent. For now, the best explanation we can come up with is that all species on earth evolved from a single source or multiple similar sources. If one day we discover that some species evolved from an organism that arrived here via space debris and others evolved directly out of inorganic material, then we may have a modified or new version of our common descent theory.
This is exactly why we need to change the voting system, and as long as you vote for one of the two major parties the system will never change. The Democrats and Republicans like the current voting system, and they like it when they can point the finger at a third-party candidate and say "that is why I didn't win". Instead they should be thinking about changing the voting system, but they won't because that means third party candidates will have an even better chance to actually win and take away some of their power.
I'd keep all my stuff in a shopping cart. I could even fit a couple changes of clothes, some extra food, medicine, misc. garbage, etc. The three working wheels on the bottom would make it easy to push my stuff around to a good work location during the day and a comfortable place to sleep at night.
Probably many people are concerned about the privacy issues. Public information about your family could be used against you or your family by classmates, angry neighbors, etc. But I agree with you, and I'm not sure why you were modded down. I blog about my family, mostly for the enjoyment of my friends and relatives. I do think about what information I should or shouldn't share with the public, but in general I think if someone is out to get me for some reason, they probably aren't going to be helped that much by a blog. In fact it may even be a deterrent if they get to know me or my kids.
It seems like shortening the length of these types of patents would be such a simple solution to our current litigation problem. I would prefer no patents on software at all, but as an easy alternative, why not just make the life of a software patent something like 3 years. That would be plenty of time for a company with a good idea to get a competitive advantage, and it would prevent a lot of these wasteful lawsuits. After the 3 years the idea should go to the public domain, so that anyone can use it without fear of retribution.
According to wikipedia CDE didn't come out until 1993.
There is a presentation about similar topics by Luis von Ahn on here. The presentation talks about using what he calls human computation, basically using people on the internet to perform various tasks that are difficult for computers to do. One idea is using people playing a game to label images on the internet so that they can be indexed with much greater accuracy than the current google image search.